Re: Continuations in Common Lisp (with apologies)

From: Peter Seibel (peter_at_javamonkey.com)
Date: 02/11/05 

Date: Fri, 11 Feb 2005 01:40:58 GMT

"William D Clinger" <cesuraSPAM@verizon.net> writes:

> Yes. For this to work, the tool may have to redefine one or two of
> Scheme's standard procedures. The Scheme standards explicitly allow
> this. In my view, any tool that purports to hide the control aspects
> in some magic way should also assume the burden of implementing that
> magic. The specific magic you mentioned can be and has been
> implemented in portable Scheme.

Can you summarize roughly what the implementation of such magic would
entail? Which standard procedures would a library that, say,
implements user-land threads with continuations, have to reimplement
and how would the reimplemented versions work compared to the standard
ones.

Also, what happens if I have two such libraries. For instance, suppose
I'm writing an application using user-land threads and some of the
work I do in those threads involves calling into a library that uses
continuations for backtracking. Is that likely to be possible?

-Peter 

-- 
Peter Seibel                                      peter@javamonkey.com
         Lisp is the red pill. -- John Fraser, comp.lang.lisp